Another year, another heat record broken. Australia entered the new year breaking its heat record in 2019. Last year was 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the historical average since 1910, according to data from the Bureau of Meteorology.
Following reports this week that such a move was imminent, the Food and Drug Administration is bringing the hammer down on your beloved, fruity pre-filled e-cigarettes capsules in an attempt to curb the rise of youth vaping in the U.S.
The heyday for Pokémon Go headlines has long since passed, but it turns out that in 2016, Canada’s military ordered officers to play the game after civilians kept wandering onto bases in pursuit of Pokémon.
The first season of Jodie Whittaker’s tenure on Doctor Who was marked by change. New Doctor, new showrunner, new tone, there was a subdued approach that emboldened Doctor Who’s moral core while struggling as it pulled away from some of the show’s more primal pleasures. Back for her sophomore season,…
Google, in its bid to move into healthcare, reports that researchers have successfully trained AI to detect breast cancer with greater accuracy than doctors. In a Google-funded study, a team of independent researchers from various hospitals and universities, researchers from Google Health, and engineers from DeepMind (a Google-owned UK-based AI…
The witch in the woods has found a new feast, along with a possible eating companion. The new trailer for Gretel & Hansel has arrived, promising a new take on a familiar tale. We all know what the Borg Queen witch has in store for Hansel (yummy num nums), but…
In her first public statement since a top United Nations official equated her imprisonment to torture, former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning reaffirmed her pledge to remain in jail rather than testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Movie trailers aren’t just an advertisement, they’re an artform in and of themselves—condensing a movie down into its finest moments. Sometimes, as we saw with films like Suicide Squad and Hellboy, a trailer can even outshine the movie it’s promoting. Now, a new video montage is celebrating this decade’s best movie…
Large parts of eastern Australia are now in catastrophic fire danger. With over 4 million hectares destroyed you may be wondering how you can help, so here’s some of the best charities and organisations.
January 2020 is here, and it arrives bringing tons of new reading material to propel you into alternate dimensions, to war-torn planets, into realms of strange magic, and so much more, with books by Seanan McGuire, Kameron Hurley, R.A. Salvatore, William Gibson, and over 30 others.
We ended 2019 obsessed with a gleefully dumb bard’s equally gleefully dumb banger of a tune. It’s a new year, a new you: so experience said gleefully dumb song in a slightly new way!
Scientific warnings about the risks of unchecked global warming have reached a crescendo in the past couple of years, with urgent messages from researchers on social media, in congressional testimony, and even directly in the text of research papers.
I would like to see the baby the Funko Pop.
It’s not just monsters they have to watch out for anymore. The first trailer has arrived for A Quiet Place Part II, the sequel to John Krasinski’s surprise horror hit, which sees Evelyn Abbott (Emily Blunt) and her family venturing beyond their home and finding that sound-detecting creatures aren’t the…
On Monday, Microsoft announced that it had taken control of 50 domains associated with a hackers believed to be operating out of North Korea. Unsealed court documents show that the domains include “hotrnall.com,” “office356-us.org,” and “mai1.info,” among other copycat URLs.
As far as we can tell, the 2010s were nothing close to what most of us expected. Instead of flying cars, we got half-baked semi-autonomous vehicles. Instead of social media birthing kumbaya, it fuelled genocide and helped erode the foundations of democracy and reality itself. Rather than tackle the impending…
Gadgets have to work a lot harder to suck in 2019 than they have in years past. They have to bankrupt companies, reveal our data, or be so overpriced they even make Apple look cheap. The gadget below did all that, but some went even further. Some were pointless Skymall…
Who’d have thought the company that developed a discreet and highly addictive nicotine product would have trouble preventing its very own employees from using it in the workplace?
Trashing your old electronics is bad for the planet—a big reason why you might’ve noticed tech companies push sustainability programs in recent years. Sonos recently joined the recycle brigade in October, launching its Trade Up hardware upgrade program that gives users discounts if they “responsibly recycle older products.” It’s a…
In its quest to create new ways to make its denizens dissociate from reality, Snapchat is launching a cartoon series that puts user avatars in the episodes.
Australia is experiencing some of the worst bushfires in our country’s history, but that’s not going to stop Sydney from enjoying an annual New Year’s Eve tradition. Fireworks in the country’s largest city will proceed like normal tomorrow night, despite the fact that the region is under a total fire…
Netflix’s “best of” content rankings reek of bullshit. And based on Netflix’s own metrics for popularity, they are.
Researchers working in the Outer Hebrides island chain off the west coast of Scotland have uncovered evidence of a previously unknown rock monument located within a stone’s throw of the iconic Calanais Standing Stones.
Disgraced Chinese scientist He Jiankui has been sentenced to three years in jail for creating the world’s first genetically modified human babies.
Making your own digital camera sensor isn’t as complicated as you’d think, as YouTube hardware hacker Sean Hodgins discovered. But you’ll need a solid understanding of electronics, an immense amount of patience, a steady soldering hand, and very low expectations of how your homebrew hardware will perform.
The injustice of our current contraceptive regime needs no elaboration. Enough to say that it’s bizarre, at this late date, that male birth control still does not exist. Every couple of years some scientist says they’re on the brink, and the same stale monologue jokes are hauled out of storage;…
At around mid-day on Friday, international shipping between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea ground to a halt when Liberian-flagged container ship Songa Iridium collided with the embankment on the European side of the Bosphorous Strait in the centre of Istanbul.
Long ago, Google made the mistake of adopting the motto, “Don’t be evil,” in a jab at competitors who exploited their users. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has since demoted the phrase in its corporate code of conduct presumably because of how hard it is to live up to it.
When an important replacement part for a ship scheduled to call in Dubai was needed from a Scandinavian supplier, air travel wouldn’t cut it back in 1976. That part needed to be driven out there. It was a gruelling journey, but for Norwegian trucker Jan Dabrowksy and his Scania, it…
While 2019 was filled with all sorts of content—television, movies, comic books, video games—that kept us busy, there were a lot of major franchises meant to wrap up some pretty epic stories this year. Did they all succeed in telling emotional tales that resonated with the fans who’ve been along…
And, appropriately enough, it’s called Ragnarok.
Wait, where’s Rose? As anyone keeping up with the state of Star Wars discourse has undoubtedly heard, Rose Tico, the Resistance engineer introduced in The Last Jedi and played by Kelly Marie Tran, has a very small amount of screen time in The Rise of Skywalker. Like, compared to her…
We’re in a pretty stable place right now when it comes to gadgets. For the most part, we’re currently stuck in a cycle of continuous, minute iterations to the same ol’ tech and it’s hard to get excited about that. But the gadgets below didn’t just end up being our…
